country-people, who had come to the town for amusement or employment,
and, losing or wasting their means, had walked the streets all the night
long, applied for shelter; orphans selling flowers, or peddling about
the theatres; the children of drunkards; the unhappy daughters of
families where quarreling and abuse were the rule; girls who had run
away; girls who had been driven away; girls who sought a respite in
intervals of vice,--all this most unfortunate throng began to beset the
doors of the "Girls' Lodging-house."

We had indeed reached the class intended, but now our difficulties only
began.

It would not do to turn our Lodging-house into a Reformatory for
Magdalens, nor to make it into a convenient resting-place for those who
lived on the wages of lust. To keep a house for reforming young women of
bad character would only pervert those of good, and shut out the decent
and honest poor. We must draw a line; but where? We attempted to receive
only those of apparent honesty and virtue, and to exclude those who were
too mature; keeping, if possible, below the age of eighteen years. We
sought to shut out the professional "street-walkers." This at once
involved us in endless difficulties. Sweet young maidens, whom we
guilelessly admitted, and who gave most touching stories of early
bereavement and present loneliness, and whose voices arose in moving
hymns of penitence, and whose bright eyes filled with tears under the
Sunday exhortation, turned out perhaps the most skillful and
thorough-going deceivers, plying their bad trade in the day, and filling
the minds of their comrades with all sorts of wickedness in the evening.
We came to the conviction that these girls would deceive the very elect.
Then some "erring child of poverty," as the reporters called her, would
apply at a late hour at the door, after an unsuccessful evening, her
breath showing her habit, and be refused, and go to the station-house,
and in the morning a fearful narrative would appear in some paper, of
the shameful hypocrisy and cruel machinery of charitable institutions.

Or, perhaps, she would be admitted, and cover the house with disgrace by
her conduct in the night. One wayfarer, thus received, scattered a
contagious disease, which emptied the whole house, and carried off the
housekeeper and several lodgers. Another, in the night dropped her
newly-born dead babe into the vault.

The rule, too, of excluding all over eighteen years of age caused g